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Showing posts from May, 2018

Ethereum - Smart Contracts and Blockchain Principles

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Ethereum is the most interesting blockchain platform right now. I have lots of interest in IOTA and HashGraph  because they claim to solve scalability problems that ethereum and pretty much most of platforms/token have, however they don't have as big adoption and rich ecosystem as ethereum has. Blockchain got popular in 2009 thanks to Bitcoin paper but the market and development industry still pretty new. Ethereum allows us to create Smart Contracts which are far more powerful then what you got when you work with bitcoins. Most of the ideas in blockchain and ethereum platform are not new, they are pretty old concepts like Cryptography , Immutability , Distributed Computing , and Consensus Algorithms . Clearly, the Financial sector was the first application field for blockchain, however, we are not limited to financial applications and we could use for many other industries like HealthCare, Agriculture, Energy, Real estate, Legal, Insurance, Education, Gov and many others. Here

Internal System Design: The Forgotten Discipline

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Several years ago it was impossible to think about software development without having at least a business specification(usually in a word document) and a bunch of UML diagrams like package, class and sequence diagram. That was a pre-agile era where process and formality ruled the IT software development industry(yes folks, yes I'm old). Back on that time software engineering was pretty much conceived as "process".  Now we live in a more civilized era, however, back on that time, there were some interesting and valuable things(tools, techniques, principles and even practices).  Like the English expression, you need throw bath water but keeping the baby. I was wondering why these phenomena happened and still happen today. First of all, we are SOCIAL animals we tend to have some kind of "fashion" behavior where we follow the "flow". Needless to say that UML and Software internal design is not quite popular today with the new kids. I don't miss the

Code for Reliability

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It's normal to talk about failure when we talk about cloud-native architectures. Pretty much anything that runs on the cloud(data center) means more distribution(networking). Distributed Systems tend to fail all time. Chaos Engineering is great, however, it's for the infrastructure, therefore focused on the big picture. When I say big picture I mean outside of a microservice. Reliability is not just for the outside boundary or infrastructure but also for Inside a service or inside the system. Reliability Inside the system might have many names such as(very popular in Brazil during 2k years) Defensive Programming .  There are lots of synergy between reliability , defensive programming, anti-fragility and Efficient Internal System design. Efficient design it's not only about making your system efficient in sense of economics(code, readability, reduce maintained cost) but also reliability. Today I want to share some internal system design way of think in order to achieve be

C Unit Testing with Check

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When I start on IT, several years ago(+15), C was the first language that I learned. But was not the first language I mastered and deployed in production which was...surprisingly Visual Basic 6.0. However, when I learned C or any language back on that old and arcane time noddy was into testing. However now is impossible to work professionally in any language without tests. C is a low-level language but still kicks ass and has several interesting libs/frameworks. People use to fear C a lot because of lack of syntactical sugar but once you get used to it is not that hard at all. Today I want to show how you can do Unit Testing with C. I will not show how to do Unit Testing with C++ but with C ANSI actually. We will be using Check a unit test lib for C ANSI.